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King Crimson – In The Wake Of Poseidon – Heavy on the Mellotron

King Crimson’s second studio album debuts on the site with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides

This pressing is Big and Tubey, with clear, breathy vocals, especially critical to the success of the a capella opening track, “Peace – A Beginning”

This lovely original Island Pink Label British Import LP has a beautiful textured cover and plays as quiet as we can find them, Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus throughout

4 1/2 stars: “The record…, however, has made an impressive show of transmuting material that worked on stage (“Mars” aka “The Devil’s Triangle”) into viable studio creations, and “Cadence and Cascade” may be the prettiest song the group ever cut.”

If you love the sound of a vintage All Tube recording of the mellotron — whether by Led Zeppelin or The Moody Blues — you will find that Robin Thompson has got hold of a very good sounding one here. Thompson is of course the engineer for the first King Crimson album, so his recording skills as regards the instrument are well established.

Note that the British Island pressings for this album as well as the first are by far the best sounding, assuming you have a good one. What is interesting about early Island LPs is just how bad some of them are. And let me tell you, we’ve paid the price in time and money to find out just how bad some Island Pink Labels can sound.

The bad ones of course never qualified to be Hot Stampers and were never offered for sale. As luck would have it the collectors of the world were more than happy to take them off our hands. They wanted the “right” label; they obviously were not looking for the best sound.

Click on the Pink Label link above to read more about some lessons we learned.

What the best sides of this 1970 Prog Rock album have to offer is not hard to hear:

he biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space

The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970

Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low

Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments (and effects!) having the correct timbre

Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is, of course, the only way to hear all of the above

Size and Space

Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center of the soundfield.

Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

We often have to go back and downgrade the copies that we were initially impressed with in light of such a standout pressing. Who knew the recording could be that huge, spacious and three dimensional? We sure didn’t, not until we played the copy that had those qualities, and that copy might have been number 8 or 9 in the rotation.

Think about it: if you had only seven copies, you might not have ever gotten to hear a copy that sounded that open and clear. And how many even dedicated audiophiles would have more than one of two clean British early copies with which to do a shootout? These records are expensive and hard to come by in good shape. Believe us, we know whereof we speak when it comes to getting hold of British pressings of Classic Rock albums.

One further point needs to be made: most of the time these very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy do what this copy can, it’s an entirely different – and dare I say unforgettable — listening experience.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

21st Century Schizoid Man I Talk To The Wind Epitaph

Side Two

Moonchild The Court Of The Crimson King

AMG 4 1/2-Star Review

King Crimson opened 1970 scarcely in existence as a band, having lost two key members (Ian McDonald and Michael Giles), with a third (Greg Lake) about to leave. Their second album — largely composed of Robert Fripp’s songwriting and material salvaged from their stage repertory (“Pictures of a City” and “The Devil’s Triangle”) — is actually better produced and better sounding than their first.

Surprisingly, Fripp’s guitar is not the dominant instrument here: The Mellotron, taken over by Fripp after McDonald’s departure — and played even better than before — still remains the band’s signature. The record doesn’t tread enough new ground to precisely rival In the Court of the Crimson King.

Fripp, however, has made an impressive show of transmuting material that worked on stage (“Mars” aka “The Devil’s Triangle”) into viable studio creations, and “Cadence and Cascade” may be the prettiest song the group ever cut. “The Devil’s Triangle,” which is essentially an unauthorized adaptation of “Mars, Bringer of War” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, was later used in an eerie Bermuda Triangle documentary of the same name.

Jethro Tull’s Stand Up – Is The Pink Label Always The Hot Ticket?

Well, it certainly can be, but sometimes it isn’t, and failing to appreciate that possibility is a classic case of misundertanding a crucially important fact or two about records. Audiophile analog devotees would do well to keep these facts in mind, especially considering the prices original British pressings are fetching these days.

Simply put: Since no two records sound alike, it follow that the right label doesn’t guarantee the right sound. A recent shootout illustrated both of these Truths.

We had a number of Pink Island British pressings to play — if you hit enough record stores often enough, in this town anyway, even the rarest pressings are bound to show up in clean condition from time to time — along with Sunrays (aka Pink Rims), Brits, early Two Tone domestics and plain Brown Label Reprise reissues. All of them can sound good. (We do not waste time with German and Japanese pressings, or any of the later Chrysalis label LPs. Never heard an especially good one.)

What surprised the hell out of us was how bad one of the Pink Label sides sounded. It was shockingly thin and hard and practically unlistenable. Keep in mind that during our shootouts the listener has no idea which pressing is being played, so imagine hearing such poor reproduction on vinyl and then finding out that such bad sound was coming from a copy that should have been competitive with the best, on the legendary Pink Island label no less. (Of course the other Pinks were all over the map, their sides ranging from good to great.)

Hearing one sound this bad was completely unexpected, but hearing the unexpected is what we do for a living, so I suppose it shouldn’t have been. Having dubious looking reissues and the “wrong” pressings beat the originals and the so-called “right” pressings from the “right” countries is all in a day’s work here at Better Records.

Still, a Pink Label Stand Up sounding this bad? I have to admit I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. But we don’t let our heads tell us which pressing sounds the best, an approach to finding good records that most audiophiles to this day apparently subscribe to, if my reading of reviews, forum posts and the like is correct.

We find blind testing using only our ears works much better. This approach regularly leads to our finding amazingly good sounding “unknown” pressings, and, in the case of Stand Up, amazingly bad well-known ones as well.